Brother Dear
by daisy-chains-and-bow-ties
Summary: Mycroft Holmes has many secrets, but one of the most dangerous is that he has a younger brother, Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock is the one thing Mycroft cannot afford to have - someone for whom he really is prepared to do anything. This is the story of two uncommon brothers haunted not by the things they've done or the things they've seen, but by one another.
1. Chapter 1

Sherlock's hair falls in sooty tufts over the creases on his forehead. He sits cross legged, dirty feet wedged uncomfortably beneath the seat of his raggedy pyjama bottoms, stained and torn from his recent 'expedition' into the nearby woods. Apparently he was searching for spies hiding their painted faces among the leaves. There's a book he's got wedged open with his bony elbows, and his cherub lips move slowly as he forms the words, clearly frustrated with his sluggish mind.

My idiot brother is trying to read poetry again, in an effort not to appear quite so much of a dullard, no doubt. I have long done away with the wistful words he's stumbling over like an infant haltingly reciting the alphabet. I've cast it away like all the childish whimsy my precocious sibling so desperately clings to.

His jumper hangs, rumpled, off his back, too loose despite its age. I was under the impression that children were supposed to grow, but Sherlock eats only when mother assumes her self-acclaimed 'monstrous' form, practically forcing some gruel or other through his pouting lips. Stubborn to a definite fault is my brother. I watch his as he turns the page with a frustrated sign. He's rogue thin, like an urchin from the bloody sixteenth century, but there's brittle strength in his fingers. I've had experience with that strength, and have little desire to subject myself to such physical strain again, though I doubt I shall avoid his voracious hunger for violence for very long.

We're opposites, Sherlock and I. Where I eat compulsively, he treats sustenance as a means of continuing with his erratic existence. I exult in fixing things, Sherlock in breaking them. I crave perfection, and he delights in the griminess of the world. Putting this laborious analogy simply, as I always find myself having to do, my brother is a loose cannon, as like to fire upon his friends as at the enemy, and the fragile boundaries between the two sides of him lie locked away in his musty head, which he is too stubborn to let me explore.

There's a jagged, roughly wrought scimitar wedged down the back of his shirt, the pommel protruding from his collar, no doubt grating against the knobs of his spine. Sherlock is forever caught between two sides of himself. There is a glimmer of myself somewhere, which desires knowledge simply for its own sake, and a darker sheen of chaos I find myself morbidly fascinated by. I can't help but scoff at his forced studiousness. At four years of age my brother has barely moved onto Keats, and his knowledge of all things useful is rudimentary. You have to feel sorry for him.

I feel a flutter of impatience in my chest, calmed by the comforting reminder that tomorrow I will be bound for boarding school, borne toward a world far larger than the limited culture of our family home, with Sherlock bumbling around like an imbecile. Soon I will be far from the veritable farm yard of intellect my mother so charitably calls home, among individuals who can actually hold semi-intelligent conversation. I rest my head back against the grass-stained leather and breathe a sigh of quiet contentment.

**A/N: So there's the first chapter. Hope you liked it. If you did, please let me know.**


	2. Chapter 2

Sherlock's eyes catch mine like hooks, boring into me like acid from those oily jars he keeps in his room. There's insolence in that stare, mixed with wily contempt. He seems pleased that my demeanour once again hangs on the boughs of numb horror. I remember Sherlock impatiently recounting to me the bones of a discussion between my mother and the headmistress of the school I was to be sent to. He'd just revealed the barest hint of something not quite right, something about my possibly being disappointed, when a bird shooting from a nearby bush had taken him trotting in its wake, peering through a homemade spyglass at the dreary heavens.

"I'm not going back there," I repeat, in case Mother, who is stood with her back to us, stirring some vile concoction with a wooden spoon, her hair stuck up like a crow's nest, has somehow failed to hear my first objection. Sherlock sniggers and I feel something strike the side of my face. He has my eraser crumbled on the table in front of him, filched from my schoolbag, cast off carelessly at the foot of the stairs after mother dragged me home. I can't summon the energy to hiss at him, because the dim realisation strikes me then that he is the closest I will ever come to having an equal.

I catch sight of my mother's reflection in the tiles propped haphazardly behind the stove, and catch the scent of burning porridge. It isn't really surprising that she's furious, but I wish she wouldn't persist in making such a great deal of it. The train system must get hacked all the time, with that meagre security system, and I had to get away from that place somehow. "Mycroft Holmes," she starts to say, and the hairs have already risen on the back on my neck with this rare use of my actual name, instead of that supposedly endearing but frankly quite insulting 'Mikey'. However, both her imminent tirade and Sherlock's mounting eraser fragment assault are halted by the doorbell.

Mother throws down the spoon, "Stir that please," she says tersely, and I assume she means me. Sherlock amuses himself with completing an elaborate etching beneath the table using the now blunt edge of a table knife. I grate the spoon back and forth, trying to shift the congealed grey lumpiness from the bottom of the pot, but I've barely added half of the blackened pockmarks to what can only be generously described as breakfast when I feel a hand on my shoulder. Mother pulls me from the stove, and clicks off the heat, leaving Sherlock gawping from across the room.

I shiver involuntarily and find myself wishing father was home. By the muddy boot prints leading from the welcome mat to the living room door, which is tightly shut despite its apparent occupation, I can visualise several well-built men, and one more moderately endowed individual, wedged between the parade of well-dressed men as though he's in their charge, the intellectual.

The mud coating the floorboards means they don't have much domestic regard, or else they'd have wiped their feet on the way in. One of them isn't accustomed to trekking anywhere remotely muddy, most likely the short cryptographer with shoes two sizes too small.

I chastise myself silently for slipping, once again, into the realm of cheap tricks. The larger drips around his shoeprints indicate that he's let his trouser legs become muddied. The others kept their sufficiently elevated. They won't have tea, even if my mother offers. They have umbrellas but they're not hung up in the stand. The spatters on the floor say the umbrellas were wet.

Conclusion: rude.

But very interesting.

**A/N: Sorry about the absolute age since my last update. Follows are appreciated, but you know... reviews are even better :) Please?**


	3. Chapter 3

I see his puppy dog eyes before his voice rings out across the dusty room. It's barely a month since I left, but already my pillows throw up spiralling flows of dust as I fling my suitcase down. "Are you going again?" his voice sounds smaller than I remember, and his eyes glint with intelligence I'd once dismissed.

I observe him sadly, feeling those wide eyes calculating as I slump back onto the bedspread, "I'm sorry Sherlock," I say it because I don't want to forget that he deserves every ounce of it. I don't ever want to forgive myself.

He nudges the door open and crosses to my side with uncharacteristic reluctance. His movements, usually so lithe, seem halting now. "What for?" he mumbles. I turn my head and stare at him. His hair has grown a little longer, tickling the top of his wonkily fixed collar. I was always so cruel. It hardly seems surprising that he reacted the way he did.

"You need to know this Sherlock," I say, my voice strained, "Because coming from anyone else it won't mean anything to you." His frown is pronounced as he stares at me, barely comprehending. "You're… clever, Sherlock, really clever. You're not an idiot. That was all I could assume, but those children… they didn't come close to you, and they were supposedly 'gifted'."

Sherlock shakes his head, opening his mouth to protest. I raise a hand, silencing him, "I'll be gone tomorrow, brother dear, and I won't be back for a while. You'll have to find some other subject of amusement," I chuckle, "I'm going…" I consider how I might explain it.

"The British government," Sherlock says.

"Yes… how?"

"The car," Sherlock's head is angled down. What have I done to him? He can't believe his own brilliance. Four years old and I've already crushed every dream he had. I reach out, taking his grubby hand in mine, urging him to continue "I could hear the car from the kitchen, that type of car, pretty big giveaway. We don't know anyone remotely in the range of that sort of machinery. Your returning from school, having found its students wanting in all aspects, what else was going to happen? The footsteps settled it. The shoes…" he trailed off, staring up through his eyelashes in trepidation. I've always condemned his 'deductions' as intellectual flailing.

"Brilliant, Sherlock," I whispered.

"Really?"

"I'm sorry for everything I've put you through. I'm just a freak, it seems," I stare wistfully at the ceiling.

He squeezes my hand, "I don't think you're a freak." He's biting his lips, eyes glowing with the realisation of all I've said. I wonder if I've made enough of a difference to atone for what I've inflicted on him.

"Brother dear, I never imagined caring would hurt this much."

**A/N: Sorry about the shortness of that chapter. It sort of just...happened. I'll be posting the next one later on today.**


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N: Sorry, I was supposed to upload this last night, but The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender was on Netflix and... I realise that it isn't an excuse but my evening sort of dissolved into Doritos and orange juice so yeah. **

He doesn't look up as I walk in with father trailing behind me, clutching the solitary bag I've chosen to lug home with me for my compulsory week end break in the family home. Sherlock has an array of apparatus set out before him, sketches of a pair of shoes, captioned with his deductions. A photocopied police report sits by his elbow. Badly printed, so I assume his acquiring it was a hasty affair, likely illegal. I roll my eyes at his apparent absorption with his work, noting the halting scrawl of his pen across the page. He's paying fine attention not to his latest obsession, but to me, a very old obsession.

Over the past few years we've grown increasingly distant, Sherlock and I, and he increasingly preoccupied with this foolish occupation he seems bent upon spending his talent pursuing. The next best person in the world to me and he's solving crimes like some glorified detective. Precisely like a glorified detective, in fact.

"What is it you're calling yourself again?" I ask as Mother sets down a plate practically brimming with food, appropriating a far less ambitions portion beside Sherlock with a thump that makes it abundantly clear just how his detecting will proceed if he doesn't eat it. Despite a cursory greeting, Sherlock hasn't yet chosen to acknowledge me. Must he always behave so childishly?

He sighs dramatically as though committing his attention to me is a great trial on his patience, "Consulting detective, Mycroft. Do try to keep up."

I resist the temptation to roll my eyes at his theatrics, "I shall endeavour to, brother mine."

I frown, noting how his fingers shake as they trail carelessly to pluck a slice of toast from his plate. My brother is nine, hardly within the age profile for me to be worried quite yet. It's probably exhaustion, or a sugar dependency in the process of being stamped out by Mother. Where Sherlock's diet is concerned, she has become more and more stringent of late. "And have the authorities… consulted with you on anything yet?" I ask as Mother bustles back to make a valiant attempt not to burn the scrambled eggs.

Sherlock fixes me with a slit-eyed glare, but his lower lip wobbles like so much jelly, "I've told you this love affair with the macabre is simply childish."

"Hmm," Sherlock mused, back in his haughty element, "You seem intent upon labelling everything I do as such."

"Not without reason," I grumble, slicing my sausages into equal quarters before placing one greasy portion into my mouth. Sherlock watches as I chew, his disgust clear on his features. I will never understand this derision toward food in general. Sherlock regards his body as a machine, and machines need fuel, thus the human body needs food. Yet the piece of toast he'd picked up lies abandoned on the edge of the table, and Redbeard is eyeing it jealously from across the room, his auburn coat shining in the morning sun.

Sherlock's fingers tremble again as he picks up his pencil, and I find my stomach turning with this strange, churning emotion I've been set upon by at largely inappropriate moments over the past few months. I believe they call it concern. "Your hands are shaking, Sherlock," I caution, making sure Mother can't hear. She wouldn't approve of my pointing it out.

My brother regards his long, pale fingers with annoyance, "Yes, I've already dropped two important things today. I'll spend weeks campaigning for a new microscope now. I cracked more than just the lens this time. The focus is splintered and-"

"Yes," I interrupt, "I'd keep an eye on that." Understanding dawns in his eyes and he turns to regard the plate of food speculatively.

"This is a pressing case," he tells me, "And I don't have to take your advice, brother." Nonetheless, he snatches his abandoned piece of toast moments before Redbeard's gradual assault comes to its climax. The dog slinks back toward the door, freezing as something strikes his shaggy mane. Turning his elderly head, his eyes almost bulge out of their sockets as he notices the fragment of sausage on the tiles behind him. His gaze falls questioningly on Sherlock, who is chewing contemplatively on his toast, eyes trained on the case files spread over the table. Passing over him, they settle on me and I read confusion in eyes lightly filmed with incipient cataracts. I'm not particularly fond of any organism on this planet, but Redbeard is a universally acknowledged exception to mind and Sherlock's general apathy toward other living things. I even manage to flash a smile at Redbeard before he lunges for the sausage.

Noticing Mother watching me from the stove, I return my attention to my food. Glancing over at Sherlock several minutes later, after enduring conversation with my parents (the indescribable horror!), I see the subject of his recent obsession. _Carl Powers_ I see from the police report. Ah, that _was_ an interesting case, set down on my desk as a sort of dare by one of my colleagues. I'd indulged myself with it. Missing shoes, and the only POE even remotely connected to it all… a child, like Sherlock, as clever as Sherlock.

My brother continues to mutter to himself, grudgingly reaching for more food under my watchful eye. Always so eager to plunge himself into danger; I can only imagine what the knowledge that another young boy existed in the world with that same unquenchable drive, already straying to the opposite side of the line Sherlock has so hastily constructed for himself. Best not to tell him just yet, preferably never, though I doubt that will be possible. Still, I do try to live in hope.


	5. Chapter 5

"Do you remember that story you told me?" Sherlock trails into the room with Redbeard at his heels, looking more ragged than ever. There's a sensation in my stomach, as though I've just swallowed an ice cube.

I set down my battered copy of The Prince, a favourite of both Sherlock and I. Mother says that it appeals to our psychosis; suffice it to say we think she's barmy. "I've told you many stories, brother dear. To which are you referring?"

Sherlock rolls his eyes, something he's become quite an expert at recently. Practically every question or request is met with a world weary sign and that accomplished eye roll. "You know which one."

My eyes stray to Redbeard, now resting his aged head on his front paws, sprawled on the rug that covers the long scorch marks on the floorboards, "Yes, I think I do know what you mean." He follows my gaze with uncharacteristic sombreness from his perch on the arm of the sofa, his favourite spot that doesn't involve being shouted out of the highest boughs of a tree, and nods.

"The east wind takes us all in the end," I recall, lounging back in my armchair, looking at the further evidence of Sherlock's very first elopement into the until very recently forbidden world of pyrotechnics. Ten months old and already setting the house on fire, there are a few reasons for me to be proud of my younger brother, I must admit.

He's clearly worried about Redbeard. "Yes," I say, "It is said that when the east wind comes it will sweep across the world, icy cold and relentless, to pluck the unworthy from the Earth."

"Which means me, of course," Sherlock added, rolling his eyes once again.

"I'm afraid, brother dear," I drop my eyes to Redbeard's panting form, "That there's an east wind coming."

"The world is ending," Sherlock pronounces numbly. Melodramatic, even for him, but I suppose fate hindered him with a far greater proneness to melancholy than I, and Redbeard, of course, is special for both of us.

"The world never ends, brother," I say, returning to my book, "So long as there are those left to fight for it."


	6. Chapter 6

**Apologies for the delay. You don't want to know how many essays I'm delaying doing right at this moment, and I have no less than four tests tomorrow, all of which I am entirely unprepared for (my mind palace isn't cooperating). Enough about me, on with the chapter. **

Mother's face when she pulls open the door is dark, and there is a frantic energy behind her eyes as she leads me along to the kitchen. I drop my bag at the foot of the stairs, as is my custom, and follow her along. The kettle is sending up puffs of steam. Father is sat at the table with an empty cup, staring gloomily at it. "I got your letter," I tell her, and before I can so much as attempt in my awkward way to console her she's broken down over the kitchen sink.

Father doesn't move to comfort her, which is almost as great an indicator as the state of her cheeks and eyes that she's been crying frequently. Sherlock is absent from his usual haunt at the kitchen table where he sits and pretends to not have been awaiting my arrival. There's a nasty smell in the air. Sherlock is evidently waging a chemical war on the family home.

"He won't let me in the door," she sobs, as Father provides a series of nods, "He won't eat; won't speak except to scream at us to leave him alone. I don't know what to do."

Father stares up at the ceiling with a look of terror, "He's actually gone bonkers," he says.

Mother flings a tea towel savagely at him, "He's mourning!" she screams.

"Then let him mourn," I say, and they stare at me in astonishment, as though this hasn't yet occurred to them, "He's not a child in the conventional sense. He doesn't need a hug, he needs to be alone."

"But he won't _eat_ Mycroft!" Mother shrieks, "I won't let him waste away!"

I sighed, "Let me bring him something then."

Mother stared at me as though her genius son had suddenly morphed into a complete idiot, "I don't think," she begins.

"It's just that," Father continues.

"No," they summarise in unison.

I set my umbrella down on the kitchen table and run a hand through my hair, floppy where Sherlock's is curly. So different yet so very alike, the two of us; I allow myself a smile. "While Sherlock at I may seem eternally at odds, there is nothing quite like an arch enemy to jolt one out of stupor," I reason, quite aptly, if I dare credit myself with such an adjective where my brother is concerned. My parents remain in a state of stupor non-compliance.

"He needs me," I surmise, "I'm a metaphorical boot up his immobile backside. Do we understand?"

"Don't be condescending," Mother chastises me, but gently. She's seen my logic, and slowly starts to get a meal together.

Several minutes later I stand at the foot of the stairs, a stack of books under one arm, a plate filled with roughly half of what Mother piled onto it. I'd pushed half of it back into its respective pots and pans, "Let's not bit off more than we can chew, eh?"

I certainly feel as though I have, attempting to reason with the single most unreasonable human being on the planet. Sherlock is immune to threats as surely as he is to social conventions, but in this he is painfully ordinary. I'd received terse notification of Redbeard's slow and painful battle with cancer, and the eventual stipulation by the vet that he should be put down. Mother had recounted to me how he had held the old dog as it wheezed its last breaths, and allowed them to bear him home in silence, with the dog's corpse in the boot. When they got home, he had disappeared into his room, and hadn't been seen since.

Sighing, I start by climb, sidestepping discarded stuffed toys, no doubt flung in anger from Sherlock's self-christened 'lair' as he prepared it for siege mode. Isn't it always the way, that I should chose to feel, of all things, _concern_ for someone who seems so intent at nine years old upon throwing his life away.

I reach the dented, scuffed and scratched door on which, in wonkily fixed letters, is spelled _Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective_. I rap my knuckles on the wood, "Sherlock!" I call.

"Go away!" Sherlock howls from inside, and I feel a chill run down my spine. Slowly, I set down the plate and the books I'd decided to 'borrow' for him from a private library (in my defence the owner was being quietly tried for treason at the time) in front of his door and tread silently down the stairs. Our parents are conversing in hushed voices, awaiting news of my success. Still, they don't hear the latch click. Of all the apes on this planet, Sherlock is one of the few who can fool me, and the only one who has managed it with more frequency than I care to admit, but if I know anything at all, I know when I'm listening to a voice recording, not a voice.

"Clever, Sherlock," I mumble as I weave through the flowerbeds, mindless of the mud squelching around my shoes, which are far from waterproof. I'm a teenager through whose hands pass some of the most sensitive information on the planet, I break codes that save lives, I break codes that end lives, yet here I am crushing flowers underfoot for my baby brother. For him, it seems, I really am prepared to do anything.

Examining the sheer climb to Sherlock's window, I remember the promise I made to Mother, shortly after falling out of that window, to never attempt the climb again. Such things, she reasoned, should be left to creatures like Sherlock, for whom such heights are scaled with barely a second thought. And evidently, judging by the recent damage to the now pronounced hand holes, partially hidden by some manner of climbing vine, for whom it is descended from without hesitation.

My arms and legs protest as I start to climb. About halfway up I slip, and judder down several feet, gasping, but eventually I make it to the window, sliding it open easily. There is a sensor jammed in the keyhole to detect movement outside, hooked up to a homemade speaker with a recording of Sherlock's voice ready to play. Several drawers hang open and empty, a chair is wedged beneath the hand of the door, anchored with several other items of furniture. He's lucky father didn't attempt to get in his window with a ladder before this, but the parenting technique they used on me simply does not fit Sherlock.

He's gone, out into the world he knows nothing of, apart from what he's read in books and gleaned from the small town several miles away. I'm feeling something akin to fear now.

What have you done, brother dear?


	7. Chapter 7

**There's absolutely no excuse for how very long it has taken me to update, but rest assured that I have copious amounts of chocolate and mochas to keep me going throughout the holidays. For now, enjoy! :)**

The streets of London glow slick beneath the orange streetlights, blurring into refractions of light as the sleek black, unmarked car glides through near-empty backstreets lined with hunched figures engaged in furtive meetings. I sigh, passing my eyes over the beggars and businessmen, shop-assistants and drug dealers, my eyes seeking out a shorter figure lounging beneath an underpass or telling a druggie exactly how much washing powder he's snorting. A darker part of me still looks for the glint of blood underneath the amber glare, a blood spatter trail to where he lies dead.

My auspicious childhood was spent largely in the hope that I might escape the frustrating confines of home, and if home is where the heart is I was never too worried. Unlike my brother, I don't have one. All the same, my scorn for what my mother so condescendingly calls 'family values' hasn't yet broken through the inconvenience of my vested interest in Sherlock's well-being.

I have found myself worrying about him, constantly. And now he's run away into the dark and very adult streets of London.

"I'm sure he's fine… sir," the driver assures me. I notice how he hesitates at the honorary. It must be a little galling for a veteran of one known war and three secrets wars to refer to a chubby youth as such, but that's not what irritates me. He doesn't know a thing about how reckless my baby brother is, how much he revels in chasing intrigue. Sherlock has no interest in wealth – he plays the game for the game's own sake. It's why he's so rubbish at Monopoly. He can't invest in anyone or anything besides himself.

All the same, when I do speak, my voice if lofty, detached, as it should be, "Yes, my brother knows how to take care of himself." But he doesn't, and unlike other human beings, I cannot actually lie to myself.

Sherlock doesn't know a thing about the world he's thrown himself into, and a part of me really does believe that he won't live to know the error of his ways. Besides, he's Sherlock Holmes, and already I can see the shadow of an accomplished escapist in him. It must be dangerous to be so very good at hiding so early in one's life.

Scanning the streets outside my window, I allow my mind to stray off its beaten path and into the dusty corners I seldom explore. Sherlock's mind is so clean, but mine is too vast to contain into any construct, even a mind palace. Ridiculous, to be so encumbered by knowledge as to feel the need to sort it away, spend hours roaming imaginary halls labelling each and every thing in a desperate attempt not to forget. I shudder, how terrible it must be to have a mind so easily muddled.

Of course, if my dark predictions do ripen to truth, I may wish for such a fragile mind as others have.


End file.
